ITOCHU Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Keita Ishii, President and COO; hereinafter "ITOCHU") announced today that it has signed a capital and business alliance with Lunar Energy, Inc. (headquartered in California, U.S.A.; Kunal Girotra, CEO; hereinafter "Lunar"), a company that develops residential energy storage systems (hereinafter "ESS").

Lunar’s leading investors are Sunrun, the largest residential solar company in the U.S., and South Korea’s SK Group. Led by Kunal Girotra, a formerTesla executive, Lunar’s mission is to transition homes to 100% clean energy and create a clean future for all. Lunar will initially target the US market, the largest residential ESS market in the world, with its proprietary next generation residential ESS.

To electrify all homes and connect communities to form clean, resilient virtual power plants, Lunar has acquired Moixa Technology, Inc. (headquartered in the U.K.; Simon Daniel, CEO; hereinafter "Moixa"), a company which has optimal control for energy using a software named GridShare. Since ITOCHU invested in Moixa in 2018, ITOCHU developed the world's largest Gridshare market through the sales of “Smart Star” series, a residential ESS. ITOCHU continues to hold a sales license for Gridshare in Japan and has signed a capital and business alliance with Lunar to expand the Gridshare network.

Since 2017, ITOCHU has been selling the “Smart Star” series, a residential ESS, with cumulative sales exceeding 50,000 units, more than 35,000 units (approx. 330 MWh) installed Gridshare software. As a shareholder of Lunar, ITOCHU will continue to promote the installation and sales of Gridshare in the "Smart Star" series of residential ESS in the Japanese market and to promote Gridshare as the best global platform for controlling distributed energy resources and will contribute to realize distributed energy in a decarbonized society.